Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays won’t be inviting Avril Lavigne back any time soon. She was at their Tropicana Field the other day to perform after their game – it’s a thing they do, with various artists, on Saturday nights – but the microphone was acting up.
So did our girl act like a good Canadian and wait demurely for the technical guys to fix things up? Not so much. Instead, the St. Petersburg Times reports, she began to grumble, in language that would make a sailor blush, about how live performances in stadiums always go wrong.
But it turned out the mike wasn’t all that broken, and many of her four-letter words and their compounds were picked up and heard by the whole crowd. People booed. Toward the end of her gig, she apologized to the crowd. The Rays’ front office says it was “extremely disappointed.”
I’m sure you, like I, have long been a fan of the German-Dutch modernist master Heinrich Campendonk. But perhaps you, again like I, have been too constrained financially to invest in any of this fine painter’s works.
Lucky us. Numerous forgeries of works by artists including Campendonk have tarred the reputations of galleries and experts across Europe and abroad, and Germany’s Der Spiegel reports that as the fraud case keeps growing, the list of victims now includes Steve Martin.
Through a reputable Paris gallery, the actor/writer/banjo player paid about $850,000 – and this was in 2004, when $850,000 was real money – for Campendonk’s 1915 work Landscape with Horses. Oops! It turns out to have been one of the Campen-copies. Der Spiegel says the Cologne public prosecutor’s office has charged four leaders of the forgery ring. Losses to buyers may total almost $50 million.
Quote of the day: Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart was, I think, speaking for a lot of people when he said this, in an interview with British reporter David Mattin, about social media: “I use all this technology, Facebook, Twitter, all that. But sometimes I wonder who is in charge. Sometimes I feel like I’m an app, moving through the world, producing this output. It’s like: Who is using who?”
Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, was a hoot, but I thought his second, Absurdistan, wasn’t as good. His new one, Super Sad True Love Story, just won Britain’s Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.
Country singer and home-wrecker LeAnn Rimes, who seems to have lost a lot of weight lately, showed up in a bikini where paparazzi hang out the other day, during her Mexican honeymoon with Eddie Cibrian. Then, via Twitter, she played the let’s-talk-about-my-body game: “This is my body, and I can promise you I’m a healthy girl. I’m just lean. … Those are called abs, not bones.”
No wonder Courtney Love wants a rich guy, as I reported the other day: she needs money to pay the help. She just lost a legal ruling and must pay $35,000 to two maids – mysteriously identified only as Miriam and Myrium – for several years of housecleaning. Why they carried her so long on credit isn’t explained.